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New Scientist Live

Flu checks its biological clock to evade detection

FLU is an insidious virus. It infiltrates your cells, replicates and escapes before your immune system even knows it is there. Now we know how&colon; flu uses a clock to abscond before it is caught.

It all comes down to a viral gene that usually makes one main protein, but will sometimes make another, called a nuclear export protein (NEP). Using microRNA molecules that inhibit specific bits of the gene, Benjamin tenOever and colleagues at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City were able to slow down or speed up the production of NEP. They then watched as the virus failed to infect cultured lung cells or take hold in mice.

When NEP is made too slowly, says tenOever, the immune response is able to catch up with the virus before it spreads to more cells. When it is made faster, the virus abandons the cell before it multiplies sufficiently to infect others (Cell Reports, doi.org/j86).

So NEP accumulates at just the right rate to act as flu’s alarm clock, and once a certain amount is present, the virus jumps ship.

TenOever hopes a flu virus with a defective clock could make a new type of live flu vaccine. Such a virus might be weak enough to be safe for those most susceptible to flu, the very young and old.